Caramelo (17 page)

Regina was so pleasant it was terrible. —Well, Soledad, how lovely that dress fits you. It suits you. Like if it was made for you, really. Too bad you need a haircut. But otherwise you look perfect, I swear to you. You and the girl before you must be the same size. No, of course she won’t be coming back for it. Because she’s too fat now. She called herself
señorita
, but who knows. Think nothing of it. You’re welcome. There is no need to. Thanks to la Virgen we’re rid of that lice-ridden, backward girl.
Pobrecita
. Poor thing.

The clothes, the gifts of things la Señora Regina didn’t want anymore made Soledad feel worse for having to accept and wear them. —Now, Soledad, you’ll see. There’s no need to thank me. You can’t help it if you were raised wiping your ass with corn shucks and wandering about without shoes. A girl of your category is unaccustomed to any other way of life. How lucky you must feel now, living here like a queen.

Of course, sadness always arrives in greater doses after dark. Can crying help one get past a grief? A little perhaps. But not for always. After crying the room was still there with the clubfoot door, the six panes with two missing glass, the crack in one shaped like a question mark. Everything as it ever was, ever had been, and ever would be. Now and forever-more. Amen.

^*
Because a life contains a multitude of stories and not a single strand explains precisely the who of who one is, we have to examine the complicated loops that allowed Regina to become la Señora Reyes
.
   
Regina liked to think that by marrying Eleuterio Reyes she had purified her family blood, become Spanish, so to speak. In all honesty, her family was as dark as
cajeta
and as humble as a
tortilla
of
nixtamal.
Her father made his living as a
mecapalero,
a man whose job it is to be a beast of burden, an ambulatory porter carrying on his back objects ten times his weight—chifforobes, barrels, other human beings. Today their equivalent are the bicycle taxi-rickshaws of the
Zócalo,
inhumane and degrading, but, it may be argued, an honest labor, and practical in this polluted and overcrowded age. Back in Señora Regina’s times, however, it was sometimes necessary in the season of rain to hire someone like her father who strapped a chair on his back and for a small fee carried you across the flooded streets of the capital as safely as Saint Christopher transporting the infant Jesus across the raging stream. Regina should not have looked down too excessively on her neighbors, after all, since she had only risen in social standing by riding on the back of her husband, the Spaniard, in much the same way that her father’s customers had crossed to safe ground by riding on his
.
   Pobrecita
Señora Regina. She had not married for love. Once and long ago there had been a certain Santos Piedrasanta, a Judas-maker who killed himself for love of her. He made the papier-mâché Judas effigies burned on Sábado de Gloria, the Saturday before Easter, Judases to be strung up in the courtyard and exploded with fireworks into smoky bits of newsprint. During the rest of the year his business was
piñatas
—bulls, lyres, clowns, cowboys, radishes, roses, artichokes, watermelon slices—whatever you wanted, Santos Piedrasanta could make it. He was, in Señora Regina’s own words, “… 
muy atractivo, muy, muy, muy atractivo, pero mucho, ay, no sabes cuánto.”
^†
   
To tell the truth, she loved and still loved this Santos Piedrasanta. She had even lost a tooth once in an ugly beating, but if asked, she would say, —It’s that I fell from a eucalyptus tree when I was little. Only Narciso knew the truth. —Only you have heard this story, Narciso, only you
.
   
How Regina had broken the Judas-maker’s heart when she ran off and married the Spaniard. How, for love of her, Santos had put a gun to his own head, how Regina had watched as he destroyed that unforgettable beauty. Then she would unlock her walnut-wood armoire, and there in a drawer, inside a lacquered
olinalá
box painted with two doves and a heart bound in a crown of thorns, there wrapped in cotton wool and a scrap of bottle-green velvet, a cheap black button, a keepsake from Santos Piedrasanta’s jacket
.
   
And to see his mother chattering so animatedly, so stupidly, so childishly about a ghost who had once and long ago knocked out her tooth made Narciso realize how love makes a monkey of us all, and made him feel sorry for this woman, his mother, too young to be old, tethered to a memory and an aging husband who looked like the little brush used to scrub the pots
.
   
When Regina first met her husband he was already old. She was just a fruit vendor at the San Juan market, sucking the sweet juice of a purple sugarcane stalk when he first laid eyes on her
. —¿Qué va llevar, señor?
What will you take, sir?—not realizing he would take
her.
Who knows how it was she fell under the spell of the piano player’s waltzes. I can’t pretend to invent what I don’t know, but suffice it to say she married this Eleuterio even though she didn’t love him all that much. He was like a big grizzled vulture, but so pale and hazel-eyed, Mexicans considered him handsome because of his Spanish blood. She, on the other hand, thought herself homely because of her Indian features, but in reality she was like la India Bonita, that Indian girl, wife of the gardener, whose beauty brought Maximilian to his knees as if he was a gardener too and not the emperor of Mexico. In other words, Regina was like the papaya slices she sold with lemon and a dash of
chile;
you could not help but want to take a little taste
.

^†
These words were actually Lola Alvarez Bravo’s, the great Mexican photographer, but I loved them so much I had to “borrow” them here
.

25.

God Squeezes

      A
nd then, because I was an orphan, or, at least a half-orphan, that is, I lost my mother, which everyone knows is as good as being a full orphan since you have no one to advise you, especially if one’s father remarries. And so there I was, a good girl of good family, left just like the saying goes—
sin madre, sin padre, sin perro que me ladre
—after a typhoid epidemic swept through the town and left me motherless at an age when I still had trouble combing my own hair, and that’s why I went about
despeinada
,
with my hair in terrible knots, so terrible it was impossible to comb and had to be cut off on the feast of Saint John the Baptist, which is the 24th of June, and on this day they wake you early to bathe you in the river before sunrise, and they cut your hair with a hatchet, and everyone with their rosaries and scapulars chanting, —San Juan, San Juan
,
atole con pan
,
—and the flowers for Saint John the Baptist Day are white-white like jasmine, but with a scent of vanilla, but what was I telling you?

Look, so it happened that I, a girl of good family, though not wealthy, I, the poor relative, the Cinderella cousin of the family, one could say, because my stepmother had farmed me out just as if I was
una cualquiera
,
an anybody, a country servant girl, oh, really, it makes me want to cry to tell you this part of the story, just as if I was a nobody nothing, my father allowed his own flesh and blood to be farmed out to service on account of his new wife, the wicked stepmother, who had him enchanted by some strong magic and who convinced him it would do me good to be in the capital, but in reality she just wanted to get me out of the way, you see, because I forgot to tell you she had her own children, this woman
.

How can I tell you? Before my father remarried I lived the provincial life, yes I did, in Santa María del Río, where I studied catechism and embroidery. Well, it was a town where everyone went about smelling like horses, and so I was not at all opposed to going off to the city, you see, but how was I to know my situation would be no better than a servant’s, even if it was the kitchen of my own father’s cousin. What a barbarity! Well, here’s a broom, they said, and there you are. My life no better than that of the rooftop dog that barked all night or the clucking chickens scraping among the orange peels
.

Sometimes before nightfall, after everyone was through shouting for me to do this or that or who knows what, well, there I would be, on the rooftop watching the lights of the town opening like the night sky. I don’t know, I’ve always been, well, the things I think I keep inside me. Only you have heard this story, Celaya, only you. It’s that sometimes my heart’s like a little canary in a cage, leaping back and forth, back and forth. And when that nervous canary won’t keep still, so as not to feel so alone, I talk to God
.

Because I wasn’t bad, understand? I’d never been bad to anyone really. What had I done to deserve being locked up in that madhouse called a home? My Aunty Fina with her too many children, too exhausted to notice I was
una señorita
and well, there were things I needed to talk to someone about, and there I was living my hard times, but like the saying goes, God squeezes, but he doesn’t choke. And well, I was so young and alone in that epoch, under that foreign sky, you can’t imagine, so … how can I tell you?

Sometimes if I said I needed to confess myself, they’d let me run off to church. The coolness like the coolness inside the mouth of a mountain, like when one drives through a tunnel, understand? The stillness like the stillness before the world was born. And I remember a very odd memory that has no home and nook in which to shelf it. I was very young and sitting on someone’s lap, and someone was putting my shoe on my foot and buttoning it, because you had to have a hook in those days to put on a shoe, and this someone, buttoning me, babying me, looking after me, well, I don’t know for certain, but I think this someone was my mother. And if it was not my mother, it was God, which is the same as mother, as are all things good that happen to you, that feeling of being loved, being looked after, that feeling of absolute safety, absolute happiness, someone’s arms around me, and feeling as if no
one could ever hurt me. That was Mother. And God. Of this I am convinced
.

Mija
,
remember, when you’re most alone, God is nearby. And that time, before I met your grandfather, that was the most alone time in my memory, me a young
señorita
in the Paris of the New World, a city of grand balls and music and wonders to look and be looked at, but what did I know? The world ended and began at my Aunty Fina’s, where no one said my name except to give me an order
.

They buried my mother in one of her famous black shawls. They say the knuckles of her fingers were still black when they placed her rosary between her hands, because the only way to lessen the dye’s hold is to soak the skin in vinegar, but my mother died on the hottest day of the year, and there was no time for formalities
.

And me, all my life something of that habit of knotting and unbraiding has stayed with me, especially when I’m nervous. A rosary, or my braids, or the fringe of the tablecloth, I don’t know. The fingers never forget, isn’t that so? For several years, when I was most desperate, most alone, those years at my Aunty Fina’s and later on in life as well, I would comfort myself by rubbing vinegar in my palms, and cry and sniff and cry, the smell of vinegar, the smell of tears, one as bitter as the other, no?

Because you have no idea what it was like to live with my Aunty Fina and her sixteen creatures. You can’t imagine it. You’ve never been abandoned by your father. Your father would
never
do a thing like that
.

Ah, but don’t think my life was all sadness. After I married your grandfather, how happy we were
.

You’re getting ahead of the story, Grandmother.

Well, it was all very
divertido
.
Like something out of a beautiful movie, you could say, even though we were never wealthy … I’m talking after the war, because in that epoch before the war, the family Reyes was considered
adinerada
—moneyed, that is. The men never dirtied their hands with work, and the women never had to dip their hands in soapy water except to bathe themselves. Because your great-grandfather Eleuterio was a musician, and teacher, remember. He even played the piano at the National Palace for President Porfirio Díaz and for families like los Limantour, Romero de Terreros, Rincón Gallardo, Lerdo de Tejada
,
las familias popoff
,
as they say. I remember Narciso had a box of his father’s papers with many waltzes composed
in his own hand. I have some of them, but who knows where they all are now.
^*
Are you sitting on one of them?

I married into a family of category. At first I couldn’t bring myself to eat in front of my husband. I’d eat in the kitchen. And since Mexican food requires you to wait hand and foot on the person eating, it was easy to wait until he was through. I’d say, —I’m not hungry, I already ate when I was cooking, or, —Eat, eat, before it gets cold, do you need any more
tortillas
?
And there I’d be heating
tortillas
on the
comal
.